How does a parasite create zombie-like behavior?

Some parasites are able to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. One striking example is the "zombie ant" phenomenon, where ants infected by a parasitic fungus are manipulated to bite into vegetation followed by death and fungal growth out of the ant's neck. This research project aims to unravel how this parasite establishes zombie-like host behavior by discovering the genes that are important.

Budget

cryosectioning ($12/hour * 6 hours)

$72

laser capture microscopy ($45/hour * 12 hours)

$540

RNA extraction kit

$330

RNA amplification and library prep kit

$1,400

RNA seq (2 lanes which will fit all the samples)

$1,964

Budget Overview

Your funding will help me pay the hourly fee for the time needed on state-of-the-art equipment to collect the fungal cells out of frozen infected ant heads that have been manipulating the brain (cryosectioning and laser capture microscopy). From these cells RNA will be extracted and amplified towards DNA libraries to be able to look at the expression of genes that are in play. Part of the funding will therefore be used to buy kits for this. Subsequently, these libraries will be used for RNA sequencing. Two lanes of the sequencer will be used which will be sufficient to run all 5 biological replicates of each of the 3 sample types. A big part of the funding will thus go towards this. Finally, I will analyze the data. My time is paid for by my Marie Curie Fellowship so your funding will solely be used to pay for equipment time, sample preparation and sequencing.This will result in an immense amount of data that will answer the research question proposed here, but will also be greatly informative for future projects.

Meet the Researcher

Pennsylvania State University

Affiliations

I am a postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow in the Hughes Lab at the Pennsylvania State University. This lab resides within the Department of Biology and Entomology and is part of the Centre for Infectious Disease Dynamics. The picture shows us doing outreach at the annual Great Insect Fair.

Background

During my Master's and PhD (both at Utrecht University in The Netherlands), I specialized in biomolecular sciences and more specifically fungal genetics. Being extremely interested in fungal complexity, for my postdoc I moved to State College, Pennsylvania to study the "zombie ant fungus" Ophiocordyceps. Here I work within a multidisciplinary team which studies all aspects of parasitic behavioral manipulation such as host behavior, disease dynamics and ecology, but also parasite taxonomy and the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. I am the driving force behind the molecular work using the knowledge I gained and the techniques I developed during my PhD. Together, we are paving the way to establish the zombie ant system as a model to study parasitic behavioral manipulation.

Press

Joseph Bennington-Castro wrote an awesome in depth piece about our work and how I got to the place where I am today for io9.com. So, if you want to learn more about how I got interested in this research and what our lab does, have a look!

Still not completely clear about the how and why of this crowd funding project? Read this wonderful article on earthsky.org covering it. This piece does a really good job in explaining it clearly. Much better than I did if you ask me :-), showing that scientific writing is a true skill and I could learn a thing or two still. However, I hope to improve with every lab note!

The Epoch Times published about this Microryza project as well. This newspaper was started by John Tang and a group of Chinese Americans in 2000 in response to censorship inside China and a lack of understanding overseas about important stories like the repression of religious minorities inside China. The Epoch Times is a multi-language, international media organisation. As a newspaper, the Times has been publishing in Chinese since May 2000. Headquartered in New York City, the newspaper has local news bureaus and a network of local reporters throughout the world. It is either sold or distributed free-of-charge in roughly 35 countries worldwide, and maintains editions in English, Chinese, nine other languages in print, and 21 on the internet.

And another awesome blog post about my crowdfunding efforts and the work on behavioral manipulation our lab does. Check out Inspiring Science here or on Facebook if you're into science blogs. Sedeer el-Showk's blog posts are well-written and filled with cool science facts. Sedeer is a researcher himself at the University of Helsinki and writes for Scitable among other things. His blog post about this Microryza project is entitled: Become Part of a Research Project About Zombie Ants.

Sciencepalooza is this awesome Dutch website on which a couple of young researchers blog about anything related to science that triggers their interest. Last week I had an interview with one of them, Barbara Vreede, who herself is doing a postdoc in Portugal at the moment. We had a lovely conversation about zombie ant research, Barbara's EvoDevo research, and we got to compare geeky science tattoos. It's not in English so if you understand the Dutch language (or would like to give it a try :)), have a look at her post!

One of the best blogs on Scientopia.org is The Spandrel Shop written by Prof-Like Substance. It's a very enjoyable and informative read. Today PLS took the time to write about this Microryza project:

"the more we know about zombies the better prepared we will be for the Zombie Apocalypse. This research is a better use of your money than stock piling food an ammo." - Prof-Like Substance

The creator of the brilliant SMBC comics, Zach Weiner has been tweeting about my project and mentioned it in his blog! This means a lot because being a science geek myself, I have been a big fan of his work for years! Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, go check it out! It's hilarious!

The wonderful Kelly Weinersmith blogged about my Microryza project today! Her blog entries and podcasts The Weekly Weinersmith and Science... sort of are pretty great, so go check it out. This is also a great way to learn more about the fantastic research she does.In short, this project aims to learn more about how a relatively "simple" organism such as a fungus can establish mind-control in a relatively much more "complex" organism such as an ant. The parasitic mind-control in this case results in stunning still lives of ant cadavers with beautiful fungal structures emerging from them:

A lot of these so called "zombie ants" are found biting in to leaves in different parts of the world. That they are firmly clamped on by their jaws becomes clear when the cadaver is carefully removed. Major scars can be seen on these leaves:

In fact, due to these scars, that were also found in a 48-million year old fossil, researchers were able to determine that this parasitic mind control in ants is not something that has recently developed:

Fairly recent studies have shown how it is possible that we find zombie ants biting these leaves, even after death. The fungus causes atrophy in the muscles making it impossible for the jaws to release so they are stuck in the biting position:

Also, have a look at this video in which Joao Araujo and Dr David Hughes from the Hughes Lab explain the Zombie ant lifecycle:

So, at this point in time we already have quite some information on these Zombie ants, however we don't know a whole lot about the genes and compounds involved. Well, that is exactly where this project comes in: trying to unravel the mechanisms that underly parasitic brain manipulation. This will not only provide us with more information from a biological perspective since the findings of this project are also expected to be of interest to the medical sciences.

If you still have some unanswered questions, have a look at the iAMA I did on Reddit. Many people got involved and asked me all kinds of things related to this subject, and I tried my best to answer as many as possible. Maybe your question was asked there as well!